The FDA repeatedly told the public that an antiviral with a sterling safety record, ivermectin, should not be used to treat COVID-19 because it was also prescribed, at higher dosages, to livestock.
The agency didn't appear to show the same concern about correctly dosing the new single-shot mRNA COVID vaccines and is now scrambling to educate healthcare providers not to give children adult-strength jabs even while denying that overdosing is a safety risk.
Its demonization of cheap, widely available antivirals to treat SARS-CoV-2 infections in higher-risk populations looks increasingly shortsighted, with two new peer-reviewed studies on hydroxychloroquine's effectiveness when combined with azithromycin, a common antibiotic.
The Food and Drug Administration yanked emergency use authorization from HCQ in summer 2020 despite The Lancet retracting a study three weeks earlier that linked the antiviral to a higher risk of death from COVID, saying the authors could not "vouch for the veracity" of their data sources.
